


straightaway dangerous

by bearonthecouch



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Alchemy, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Elementary School, Gen, Teaching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2020-03-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:34:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23369320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bearonthecouch/pseuds/bearonthecouch
Summary: “What’s Al like?” he asks, around a headphone cord he’s got clenched between his teeth because his hands are full of testing manuals.“What, in my class?” Hughes asks. He’s half bent under a computer lab table, making sure everything is still plugged in where it should be. He stands up and dusts himself off. “He’s fine, Roy. Quiet. Does his work. Takes care of the hamster.”“And he’s not…”“Doodling transmutation circles in the margins of his homework? No, he is not.”(aka the one where Mustang and Hughes are elementary school teachers)
Relationships: Alphonse Elric & Edward Elric & Roy Mustang, Maes Hughes & Roy Mustang, Riza Hawkeye/Roy Mustang
Comments: 21
Kudos: 120





	straightaway dangerous

“Can you believe this?” Roy Mustang gripes as he swirls a swivel stick through his styrofoam cup full of coffee. “Staff meeting, grading window, and testing all in the same week. And Ed is driving me insane!”

Maes Hughes, who has the younger Elric brother in his class, just grins. Alphonse is stubborn, but generally well-behaved. Thank whatever higher power. “What’s he done now?” he asks, while grabbing a seat in one of the uncomfortable metal folding chairs that made up the bulk of the staff lounge’s furniture. 

Mustang sighs heavily and straddles another of the chairs. 

Though they taught different grade levels, this year they’d gotten lucky in that Hughes’s planning period coincided with Mustang’s lunch, giving them about twenty minutes in the middle of the day to catch up or bolster each other’s sanity. At least it gave them twenty minutes if one or both of them wasn’t in the classroom frantically scrambling to fix their smartboard or kid-proof a dozen computers before the long afternoon. 

“I had to get him back on track every single time I passed by him in the testing lab. He just wanted to spend his whole time doodling on his scratch paper. I don’t think he answered a single question. He’s _smart_ , Maes. He’s just obnoxious.”

Hughes shrugs. He’s just infinitely grateful he isn’t in a testing grade. “What was he drawing?” 

The pages themselves, considered confidential testing material, were shredded before Mustang was even allowed to leave the room with his third graders. But he grabs a napkin from a nearby stack and starts sketching carefully, chewing on his lower lip the entire while. He slides the completed work over to Hughes. 

“That’s alchemy? The shit you learned in high school?”

“That’s _dangerous_ alchemy. I don’t want to imagine why a nine-year-old knows this.”

Hughes frowns, and Roy can see the curiosity lighting up in his eyes, can practically hear the clicking of the gears turning in his head. Like Roy, Hughes hadn’t grown up dreaming of being an elementary school teacher. He’d been halfway through the police academy before paternity leave turned into the realization that he didn’t want to work in a job that required long hours and had a high likelihood of getting him killed. 

Teaching has its own stress, but despite the frequency of their mandated lockdown drills, it isn’t really the kind of job where you imagine criminals wielding guns as part of your daily agenda. 

“Now when you say ‘dangerous’...” Maes muses, as he lets his finger circle around the pencil sketch. “You mean like what you used to do that you never talk about?”

“Forbidden,” Roy clarifies. “Absolutely no exceptions. Just attempting this transmutation can get you killed.”

“So you turned it in, right? It’s one of those harm to self and others things. A written threat.” 

“It might just be a sketch. Anyway, it’s shredded now.”  
  
“ _Mustang_ ,” Hughes whines. “What are you _doing_?” 

“I’m trying to somehow get through to Ed Elric.” 

Same as he’d been doing since August. Same as the _entire school_ had been doing since the boy’s mother passed away as he started kindergarten. 

But Hughes just looks at Roy like he’s crazy. 

“I have to go,” Roy says, after a quick glance at his watch. 

As if Hughes would let him escape that smoothly. Maes gets to his feet as Mustang chucks his coffee cup into the trash can, and claps his hand on Roy’s shoulder. “Don’t do anything you’ll regret later.”

Roy shrugs him off. He knows plenty about regret, and Maes certainly knows that. “I don’t need a babysitter,” he says. 

“No, now you _are_ the babysitter,” Hughes agrees. “And through some pure damn luck, you haven’t doomed us all. Or ruined the next generation.”  
  
“Yet,” Roy replies. “They may have failed the PARCC, though. No thanks to my illustrious leadership.”

“They fail the PARCC every year. Don’t let it get to you.”

Roy scratches the back of his neck and glances at Hughes. “Yeah. Thanks, Maes.”

And with that, he was hustling off toward the cafeteria where his class was waiting. 

An hour later, when Mustang calls Ed’s group over to the Guided Reading table, he pulls the boy aside for a second. The kid’s long blond hair falls into his eyes as he scowls up at Mustang. 

“Ed, can you stay after school for a little bit? Fifteen minutes? Or a half an hour?”

“I didn’t even do anything!” the boy protests. 

Roy sighs. “It’s not detention, Ed. I just want to talk to you.”  
  
“Why?”

Roy uncrumples the napkin he’d slipped into his pocket and shows it to Ed. “I know what that is.”

“It’s a drawing.”

“It’s a transmutation circle. And…” he blows out a puff of air, remembering Maes’s words. “And it’s a threat. Of _what_ , I’m not exactly sure of yet. That’s why I need to talk to you.”

He whole-heartedly expects Ed to say no, but after a tense minute when six other kids arrive at the table, each studying teacher and student with the hope of seeing some fireworks, the small-for-his-age third grader shifts his feet and shrugs. “Fine,” he spits. 

_Fine_ , Roy thinks, as he sits down to begin his lesson. 

Guided Reading, whole group reading, this afternoon’s Writing Wednesday prompt, then DEAR… the afternoon passes in a comfortable rhythm of literacy and breaking up childish squabbles, retrieving band-aids, passing out papers, and reminding the students that there is an entire shelf full of dictionaries to help them with their spelling, not to mention the computers. 

Roy is yet again exhausted by the time his class’s excursion to gym class buys him another twenty-five minutes of silence and relative calm. There are phone calls he should be making to parents, papers he ought to grade, and the classroom looks like a pencil factory exploded. But he ignores all of that and thinks about alchemy instead. 

He hasn’t _really_ thought about alchemy since his discharge from the military, years ago. Recognizing a human transmutation circle is not the same thing as knowing what to do with it. Maybe Ed’s right, and it really is just a drawing, with no knowledge or intent behind it. But after spending five days a week in a room with the kid, having to contend with his brilliance, which most often shines in direct opposition to the rules and regs of the Amestrian public school system, Mustang doesn’t think Ed does anything without both knowledge and intent. 

The class returns from gym and Roy entertains them for another half an hour until the final bell, and his musings about Ed Elric’s ties to advanced alchemy continue to nag at him all throughout that thirty minutes. He’s pretty sure it’s bad enough that the kids actually notice that he’s distracted. Ed certainly does. 

At dismissal, Ed slips away to Hughes’s second grade classroom to pick up his brother, and then, to Mustang’s great shock, he actually returns. “Hello, Alphonse,” Mustang says, as the younger sibling steps out from his brother’s shadow. He waves cheerfully, and Roy can’t help but smile back. Al is younger than Ed, but taller. Even so, he looks even scrawnier than Ed does. It worries Roy, makes him want to check in with the children’s foster parent, apparently an elderly woman in the neighborhood who’d known their parents. 

But he could spend his entire life worrying about Ed Elric, with nothing left over for teaching anyone else, never mind his own mental health. He’ll take one thing at a time. The most important first. 

Ed has a quick and quiet conversation with his brother, then heads over to the table where Mustang waits. Roy sets the napkin drawing on the table between the two of them. “What’s so important about this that you needed to draw it during the PARCC?”

“Everything’s more important than the PARCC.”

“Ed.” When the boy still doesn’t say anything, Roy sighs. “Where did you learn how to draw a human transmutation circle?”

“Me and Al did this… summer thing. Down south.”

“A summer thing that taught you incredibly complex illegal alchemy?” 

Ed shrugs.

Roy resists the urge to bang his head on the table. He looks into Ed’s golden eyes, seeking some kind of connection. And then… Oh. _Oh_. 

Roy settles back into his seat and tries to look comforting. “I was a foster kid, too, you know. I know how much it sucks to be an orphan.”

“Whatever.”

“Alchemy is not the solution to this problem. Alchemy is rarely the solution to anything. It destroys much more than it creates.”

Now Ed is looking at him with obvious interest, and Mustang smiles softly.

“How do you know?” the boy mutters, still stubborn as hell. 

Roy takes the napkin from the table and flips it over, sketches the circles and triangles he can see whenever he closes his eyes, flame and salamander, the symbols overlapping into a unified whole. 

He pushes the paper back toward Ed. “Have you ever heard of the Flame Alchemist?”

“No way in hell that’s you.” Roy just shrugs. Ed glares. “You were supposed to be a hero,” he finally says. “But everyone says you just… broke, over there.”

“I did my duty. As every good State Alchemist does.”

“And then you disappeared. And turned into a third grade teacher. What the _fuck_?”

“Promise me you won’t attempt human transmutation.”

Ed shrugs. Not a promise, but not an instant no. 

Roy stuffs the napkin into his pocket and glances at Al, who is doing his homework at the far end of the room. 

“What if I teach you?”

“What, alchemy?”

“I’ll help you with anything. I was a State Alchemist, I have a lot of information you won’t have access to.”

“Anything,” Ed repeats. At Roy’s nod, he adds, “Even illegal alchemy?”

Mustang sucks in a breath, but slowly nods. He exhales carefully, still tracking Ed’s every subtle movement. “I’d rather you attempt it with my help than try it alone,” he finally admits. 

Ed nods slowly, accepting the arrangement. “I’ll see you after school tomorrow. Come on, Al,” he calls over his shoulder. “Time to go.”

* * *

If there’s one word to describe Edward Elric, Mustang thinks, it’s ‘volatile.’ The boy comes out swinging at any perceived insult, and the way he fights makes it obvious that he knows how. It isn’t graceful forms like in martial arts, or even the maneuvers ingrained in the military’s basic training. It’s the kind of knock-down, drag-out self-defense that can only be learned by getting one’s ass kicked on a regular basis, until you learn to stand up and push back. 

Worry nags at Roy, and he wonders yet again if he should check in with the foster parent. 

“You realize you’re going to get yourself arrested,” Maes interrupts his musings. “Probably the kid, too.” 

“Corruption of a minor?”

“You’ll lose your teaching certificate.” 

“It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve fallen off a solid career path, Maes.”

Hughes raises an eyebrow. “And it’s worth it? This tutoring thing?”

“I’m past the point where I can just leave him to his own devices. If I ignore this...” He trails off, knowing full well that Hughes knows what he means. _If I ignore this, and something happens, it’ll be my fault._

Maes throws up his hands at Mustang’s stubborn streak. No wonder Ed Elric drives him insane, they’re two peas in a pod. “You realize that’s yet more reason to call in the professionals.”

“I _am_ a professional. This is exactly what State Alchemists do. They keep other alchemists in check so they can’t do anything to harm innocent civilians. I’m just trying to make sure the kid doesn’t hurt himself. Or anyone else.”

“You think he’ll actually listen to you?”

“He has so far.”

“Mm,” Maes grunts. It isn’t exactly agreement, but he trusts Mustang, for some damn reason. He’s seen the man through a lot of stupid decisions, and both of them are still standing. 

Roy gives a little smile in response. 

The rising volume of the voices outside are more effective than any phone alarm at alerting him to the incoming second lunch shift. He grins at Maes and then slips out of the teachers’ lounge.

* * *

Their picture day session is scheduled for right after recess, obviously, when the third-graders will be covered with dirt, mud, and sweat, and all the effort they’d spent dressing nicely will have gone to waste. Mustang sighs and once again questions the competence of his administrators. 

Once he brings the kids inside, Roy takes a look around, trying to spot the ones who will need a spare uniform shirt to salvage their outfit enough to sit in front of a camera. Surprisingly, he only needs to hand out a couple of shirts, and neither of them goes to Ed Elric, who wore his black uniform pants, but had swapped the usual light blue school shirt for his favorite red hoodie, which he’d obviously made an effort to keep clean. 

Roy gets his class lined up, and walks them down to the gym, where the photographers have set up their equipment. The class waits in a single-file line, talkative but not overly disruptive, as each child takes their turn in front of the camera. Ed, at the end of the line, surprises no one by refusing to follow the photographer’s instructions, and just scowling at the camera with his hands in the front pocket of his hoodie. Eventually the camera flashes as the photographer snaps the photo and hurries Ed along. 

Mustang catches the kid’s eye, but Ed pretends not to see him. Roy knows better than to think that means he’s being rejected. During the school day, Ed still does everything in his power to be a raging pain in Roy’s ass. But after school, he grows animated and talkative, devouring Mustang’s mini-lectures about old and new alchemic theories that have stumped grad students three or four times his age. 

By their third after-school session, Al had abandoned his homework in favor of joining his brother, asking questions and drawing symbols and circles with great respect and care. He doesn’t share Ed’s fiery passion for alchemy, but he’s a good student and, Mustang can only hope, a positive influence. 

A few days later, Roy finally gives in to the temptation to talk to the younger brother about the observations he’d made of Ed’s behavior and the fears he has. But when he approaches the topic sideways, Al just shrugs and says “My brother can take care of himself.”

“But that’s the whole point,” Roy stresses. “He shouldn’t have to.”

“We’re not in trouble, Mr. Mustang. Not like you think.”

“I think you and your brother are planning to bring a dead woman back to life.”

There’s no mistaking the guilt that flashes across Al’s face.

“You said you’d help us,” Al points out, after a minute. He makes it sound like an accusation.

“I said I didn’t want you trying it by yourselves.”

Al just shrugs, as if he isn’t sure there’s a distinction between those two things.

Mustang takes a slow, deep breath. He isn’t sure there is, either.

* * *

“You look like hell,” Maes announces, as he and Roy begin the trek in from the parking lot side by side. 

Roy just shrugs. Maes has seen him after bad nights before, but this one was worse than usual. Riza had stayed up half the night babysitting him through the worst of the nightmares. They come in unpredictable waves, these paralyzing flashbacks and panic attacks. His mental health is shot to hell, resulting in both the Amestrian Military and Ed Elric labeling him as broken. Hughes has a theory that fighting against that label is what makes Mustang so determined to connect with the troubled children in his class. 

“Just remember what they say about empty cups and oxygen masks,” Hughes reminds Roy, as he presses his ID against the card reader on the door and pushes it open. 

“I’m fine, Hughes. Just tired.”

“Call me if you’re not fine. Or send a runner. We can at least pass notes across the hall.”

“If I wasn’t fine, I wouldn’t be here.”

“Roy. There’s no shame in waking up screaming after the shit you’ve seen. I’d think you were crazy if you didn’t.”

Roy nods agreement, mumbles a “Thanks” in Hughes’s general direction, then heads for his classroom, where the lights turn on automatically to greet him as he takes a sip of his extra-large coffee.

Half an hour later, first bell dumps 25 chattering and shrieking third-graders into his lap. He puts on a smile, and starts the day.

* * *

That afternoon, Ed is much more sullen than usual, and Roy can’t pinpoint why. He shifts a little closer to his young protege. “What was she like?” he asks softly. “Your mother.”

Ed shrugs. The truth is that his memories are hazy. He was only five years old when she died. But Al remembers even less than he does, and he has made it his goal that his younger brother will be able to see their mom again, and remember her. 

“Human transmutation is absolutely forbidden,” Mustang reminds him, when Ed tells him about his dream.  
  
“It wouldn’t be forbidden if it wasn’t possible.”

“There’s no record of anyone ever succeeding in bringing back the dead.”

Ed just ignores him, head bent over a book and hand carefully sketching circles and equations and symbols in a wide-ruled composition book Roy had given him weeks ago. 

Ed’s list is an ingredients list, with notes about where he can find them in large enough quantities. The elements are cheap and plentiful. Ed could probably round them up in a weekend. Mustang winces at the fact that the kid is probably planning to do exactly that. If he was still a State Alchemist, he’d be required to stop Ed by any means necessary. 

For now, though, all Mustang can see is a nine-year-old boy with anger issues, too smart for his own good.

“What’s stopping you?” he asks carefully. 

Ed looks up from the notebook. “What?”

“You have a workable array and you know where to find the necessary material components. What’s stopping you?”

Ed just scowls for a long minute, glaring at Mustang as though the limits of his knowledge are the teacher’s fault, instead of acknowledging that he might be the only person in Amestris who would offer help instead of carting the kid to a State trial.

“It’s like you said. Knowing how to draw a circle doesn’t mean knowing how to use it.”

Mustang nods. The human transmutation circle is the most intricate and complicated array he’s ever seen. Plenty of the symbols are completely unfamiliar, and he thinks that some of them must predate the existence of Amestrian as a language.

“How _did_ you know how to make this?” he asks. Neither he nor Ed look up from the circle.

“Well, my dad had a lot of old books. And my teacher… my summer teacher, she taught us that alchemy has a flow. And everything is part of that flow, even death. Nothing ever really ends. It just goes in a circle.”

Roy raises an eyebrow. “That’s a dangerous line of thinking. Sometimes our actions can permanently destroy things.”

“You mean like you?”

“The State Alchemists wiped out the entire nation of Ishval.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not trying to be a State Alchemist.”

Roy grinds his teeth. Flame Alchemy is every bit as dangerous as human transmutation. It’s just that one is more likely to hurt others, while the other is guaranteed to recoil back onto the alchemist who attempted the transmutation. Roy is more afraid of what will happen to Ed when the transmutation fails than any consequence that might come from succeeding. 

But no. There isn’t exactly true. He’d told Ed that he had access to the entirety of the State Alchemists’ libraries, information that no third-grader would have. And in those books and files are truly sickening reports. Ed deserves to know what other attempts at human transmutation have wrought. “Attempting to experiment on humans… what you’re trying to do, Ed, it makes men into monsters.”

He watches the boy with a serious expression, but Ed just looks down at his notebook, fixated. Roy isn’t even sure if he’s getting through to him. “Edward, look at me.”

Ed glances up, and raises an eyebrow. 

Roy sighs. He wishes he could _show_ the boy, shock him into abandoning his quest. But he can’t make copies of anything in the restricted libraries, so all he can do is tell the story. “Just listen, okay?” Mustang pleads. Ed slowly nods. “When I was still a State Alchemist, there was a case involving a man who had failed the annual assessment. He was about to lose his certification.”

The serious expression on Ed’s face made Mustang pretty sure that the boy understood what that meant. But then, he’d mentioned his father’s alchemy books. Wherever the man was now, at one point he’d been an alchemist in Amestris, and every alchemist in Amestris knows what certification is worth: it is the only practical way for someone to use alchemy to make a living. Mustang’s not an alchemist anymore, and glad about it, but this man, Shou Tucker… 

“Ed, he was so desperate to prove himself, he used human transmutation against those closest to him. His wife and daughter weren’t dead, they were living human beings, and he fused them with animals to create grotesque abominations who could only hope for a clean death. That’s what they said, you know. These chimeras that could talk. They kept repeating the same thing over and over: ‘I want to die.’ There is a reason human transmutation is such a taboo. There are a hundred reasons, each as disturbing as the last, sewn into our history.”

“Yeah, but that’s not what I’m trying to do! I just want to see my mom again! I want _Al_ to see her. I have to, Mr. Mustang, I promised! He’s my little brother and I promised! And,” he adds, more softly. “You said you’d help.” 

“I’m just trying to keep you safe, Edward. That’s all I’m trying to do.”

“Fuck you, Mr. Mustang. I don’t need your help, or your stories. Just leave us the fuck alone. Come on, Al.” Ed grabbed his backpack and stomped out of the room, his little brother close behind him. 

Mustang’s stomach twists into a knot as he watches them go. His nightmares of the boys’ possible future mixes with the memories of Ishval burning, making it difficult to breathe and impossible to focus. 

When Maes comes to get him so that they can leave together, he is worryingly dazed, and Hughes sits him in the passenger seat of his car and drives him to his own home, calling Riza on the way so she won’t worry. 

“I don’t know what to do,” Roy pleads with him, as they sit together on the couch while Elicia toddles from one piece of furniture to the next, navigating her small world, only as wide as the living room. Roy smiles weakly as he watches her. “They’re good kids.”

“I know that, Roy.”

“I can’t let anything happen to them.”

“Mustang,” Hughes offers softly, voice strained. “Have you ever considered that this decision may not be yours to make?”

“What would you do if it was Elicia?”

“I have no idea, man.”

“I just don’t want them to get hurt. They’re going to try it anyway, Hughes. They’re _going to_.”

“If you’re sure.”

“I’m pretty sure. And Hughes, I don’t know how to stop them.”

Hughes looks at Roy, a painful expression reflected in his green eyes. And he shrugs. And what Roy reads, in that moment of weakness, is: Don’t stop them.

* * *

His work is suffering. His lesson plans are suffering. Even his relationship with Riza is suffering. Everything is suffering. 

“Roy,” she says carefully, as she joins him on the couch, where he holds the remote in hand. “Why don’t you take a few days off?”

He’s already shaking his head before she’s finished making the suggestion. “I can’t. We’re still testing.” 

“They’ll figure it out without you.”

“Riza, we’re bribing the kids with ice cream if they have perfect attendance. How can _I_ be absent?”

“It’s not a weakness to take a break.”  
  
“I _know_ that. I just can’t right now.”

There’s no mistaking the sadness and worry in Riza’s eyes. She’s afraid he’ll work himself to the breaking point and wind up in the hospital. It’s happened before. 

She takes the remote from his hand and sets it down on the table. Roy almost protests, but before he can manage to, Riza presses her lips against his and then slides her hand along his side, from arm down to hip. He wraps his arms around her and shifts her body to settle atop his. She plants kisses down his neck, sucking at the soft skin there. Roy takes quick and shallow breaths and moans slightly. 

When Riza comes up for air, he shifts too, pulling himself away from her just enough to look into her eyes, which smolder with desire and pin him in place. He whimpers out something that might be her name and then gives into his own desire, and for the rest of the night it’s just the two of them, and his worry is pushed deep under the surface.

* * *

Roy wakes up before his alarm rings the next morning. He scrubs his face with his hand, groans and gets out of bed as silently as he can. It’s no good. Riza sleeps as lightly as just about any soldier Roy’s ever met, and her eyes are bright and alert as her gaze finds him. 

“G’morning,” she hums. 

Roy smiles. “G’morning. Go back to sleep.”

It’s before sunrise, the world keeping them hidden and safe in comfortable darkness. 

But Riza shakes her head, and slips out of bed, wearing only one of Roy’s t-shirts. He smiles, still sleepy, and wraps his arms around her. “It’s not even five-o-clock yet,” he points out. Riza shrugs. Once she’s woken up, it’s nearly impossible for her to go back to sleep. 

She follows him into the kitchen, where Roy makes a large pot of coffee. He sits down across the small table from her, and guilt and anxiety rage inside him. How can he even be _considering_ performing human transmutation? How can he be keeping it from Riza? The lie of omission tightens his throat and burns in his stomach. 

And he can see the way she’s looking at him. She knows he’s hiding something. She knows something is very wrong. But Roy just flashes her a smile and runs a hand through his hair and mumbles something about having to go to work. 

And Riza doesn’t initiate the conversation that might break him. She loves him that much. 

* * *

Roy has compartmentalized worries that trade places with each other. His worries about Riza subside a bit once he gets to school, replaced by anxiety about retention and articulation and the ever-important test scores. 

His day is mostly spent in the computer lab, proctoring a test designed to not require his presence. He’s in that same lab after school with Maes, cleaning up and getting ready for tomorrow, when he’ll do it all again. 

“What’s Al like?” he asks, around a headphone cord he’s got clenched between his teeth because his hands are full of testing manuals.

“What, in my class?” Hughes asks. He’s half bent under a computer lab table, making sure everything is still plugged in where it should be. He stands up and dusts himself off. “He’s fine, Roy. Quiet. Does his work. Takes care of the hamster.”

“And he’s not…”

“Doodling transmutation circles in the margins of his homework? No, he is not.”

Mustang grunts acknowledgement and sets the books and headphones on a nearby table. 

“What’s with you, man?” Hughes asks. He leans against the back of the table and the heavy computer monitor resting there. 

“Nothing.” Hughes just raises an eyebrow, and Roy sighs heavily. “Where do you want me to start? It’s May, and the kids are acting like it, for one thing. And then, worse than that, _while_ the kids are acting like it, the assistant principal comes in for an informal observation _right after lunch_.”

“Well, at least it wasn’t formal.”

“You realize that’s not at all helpful.”

Hughes shrugs. Mustang rolls his eyes and say goodbye, and then hurries back to his classroom where the Elric brothers are waiting for him.

* * *

Ed calms down when he performs alchemy. Roy has noticed this before, but now that he’s specifically observing his student, he is awestruck by the transformation. The boy who normally can’t stop kicking his chair leg or tapping his fingers on his desk becomes completely still and silent. His brow furrows in concentration, and he even holds his breath for long periods. His eyes flutter closed every now and then, as he murmurs softly under his breath in a combination of Amestrian and scientific Latin. 

Ed glances quickly at Roy before taking the dry-erase marker in his hand and drawing a sweeping circle on the wall-spanning whiteboard in front of him. He starts filling in the shapes and symbology that will make a reaction happen. The circle combines with a triangle - delta - which signifies change, and Roy smiles. This is the core of alchemy: circles and triangles, flow and change. The human transmutation matrix adds in more complexity: the symbols for birth and death and life, soul and air, heart and blood. 

Ed chews on his lower lip as he sketches the circle. 

And Roy turns a worried look onto the younger brother. 

Al looks at him with wide eyes, as he sits down next to him at the table that’s usually used for small group instruction. 

“You’re okay with what your brother is planning?” Mustang asks.

Al doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t even nod.

He’s talked with Mr. Mustang about the stories of human transmutation. Only a handful of people who’ve tried it survived. And of those, the majority were executed by the State. It’s not very hopeful. 

But Ed is certain that he - they - can do it. And Mustang seems sure enough that they’re close enough to be genuinely worried. 

Al kicks his legs back and forth and turns away from Mr. Mustang, to watch his brother draw.

* * *

The daytime sky is ominously black, the kind that precedes sharp cracks of thunder that will make the third graders scream. Roy tries not to believe in bad omens, but honestly, this is not making him feel any better.  
  
“Are you alright?” another third grade teacher asks him, and he nods. 

Another rumble of thunder rolls through the clouds. “I guess we’d better go back inside,” Mustang sighs. He and the other teachers wrangle their children into some semblance of order, and Roy marches his class back inside. He glances at Hughes’s classroom, just across the hall. Through the closed door, he can still hear Maes’s voice, patiently explaining something to do with fractions.  
  
“Come on, Mr. Mustang,” one of his students pleads, pulling on his hand.  
  
Roy sighs, and shuts his own classroom door.

* * *

“You want to tie a child irrevocably to the military?” Hughes asks, leaning onto the table on their lunch break.

“Obviously it’s not completely irrevocable,” Roy points out, around a mouthful of sandwich. 

“You know what I _mean_ , Mustang.”

“Relax, Hughes. You can’t enlist until you’re 18. And it’s not like there’s a JROTC program for alchemists.”

“I’m surprised there isn’t,” Hughes mutters.

His father’s ex-military, Mustang knows, which is the reason Maes resents the military so much. 

And the thing is, after Ishval, Roy resents it too. But there’s no other option for a prodigy like Edward Elric, and even his younger brother. Whether Roy puts the whisper in their ear now, or someone else notices them later, they won’t make it to 18 without the government keeping tabs on them. Especially since they are already wards of the state.

That afternoon, Mustang watches Ed and Al as they lean over a large chalk circle sketched out on the surfaces of pushed-together desks. He watches them for several minutes, until Al looks up, smiling when he meets the teacher’s eyes. 

Roy takes a deep breath, his eyes knitted into an expression of deep concern. He cannot believe that he’s about to do what he’s about to do. 

“Let me do it,” he insists. The two children stare at him, and after a second, Ed shakes his head slightly. Al’s mouth hangs open, trying to process Mustang’s offer, if he’s really serious. 

“What about all that stuff you said?” Ed mutters. “About how human transmutation makes people into monsters.”

“You might _die_ ,” Al points out. 

“And you think I’m going to let two of my students die when I could save them?” he shakes his head. “No.”

“It’s our mom,” Ed points out.  
  
“I don’t think that affects the success or failure of your alchemy.” Roy rests his hand on Ed’s shoulder. The boy usually doesn’t like being touched, but this time, he lets Roy’s hand stay. “I’m already a monster,” he points out. “At least let me try.”

Ed stands frozen for a long moment, then searches out Al’s reaction. The younger boy just shrugs. And Ed slowly nods. Roy smiles. 


End file.
